Week 31 Newsletter: May 15-19

Welcome back! We had a great week…and only one more left of the session! The Eagles worked hard all week to finish projects and big goals up before we leave for break. Here are some of the explorations we went on this week!:

In the personal finance quest, the navigators explored MONEY! They learned all about checking accounts, saving accounts, debit cards, and credit cards and the differences between all of them. The next assignment was to find out all about utilities and what they will cost. With research and interviews with you about your bills, they were able to get a good idea about the cost of living in LA. Finally, they tracked everything they ate for the week and the cost of each individual item to figure out what their monthly food bill will be when they are financially independent.

The foundation students have started their final projects in the physics quest! They have worked very hard the last four weeks learning and mastering the laws of physics through workshops and experiments. And now they have begun the process of creating their very own pieces of playground equipment! Each one following and displaying the laws of physics, of course. We can’t wait for these to be finished and ready to test!

This week in the biography quest for the foundation studio, we continued exploring excellent introductions. We practiced writing hooks in introductions and discussed how to truly reel in a reader first thing. We practiced this by doing an exercise called “Little Red Riding Hooks” where they each wrote their own hooks for the classic story using the Eight Great Beginnings.

This week in the journalism quest, the navigators wrote opinion pieces! The last few weeks have been focused on non-biased journalism, so this was a great change of pace. The students chose topics out of a hat and wrote either an Op Ed or a review.

In art this week, the students drew their final drafts of their animals using tracing paper. These images are now ready to go and we will start screen printing next week! Along with this, both studios practiced still life, with skulls as the subjects this week!

This week in designing your web presence, the students learned about the importance of being happy with your online presence. They talked about how to dig deep and reflect on your motivation and intention for being online, especially with where they are today and what their near future, with high school and college on the horizon, looks like. Being aware and safe and the first steps in developing yourself online were a few other things they explored. Lastly, they dedicated time to learning about the major players and people who have helped created the internet.

Navigator history was quite the learning load this week! We condensedthe Vietnam war into a nice little week-long package. We covered many things; the major players, the two sides and the allies, the countries involved and the way the world felt about the war. They did research on things like the Pentagon Papers, Agent Orange, and the Domino Theory. There was a lot to tackle this week but everyone used excellent research techniques in order to submerge themselves into this formidable war!

The foundation students learned about the after effects of WW1, as the book wrapped it up and began preparing the students for the next big war. They began learning about the big dictators in world history-both communists and fascists. Some of the figures they studied were Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini.